Author Suzanne Heywood had her life changed by a sailing trip her father dreamed of going on. Photo / Supplied
Author Suzanne Heywood had her life changed by a sailing trip her father dreamed of going on. Photo / Supplied
When she was just 7 years old, Suzanne Heywood’s life changed forever.
After a year’s warning, in 1976, Heywood, her father and mother, and younger brother were loaded into a ship, Wavewalker, and embarked on what was meant to be a three-year trip around the globe, tracking Captain Cook’s voyage to the South Pacific.
Speaking to Paula Bennett on her NZ Herald podcast, Ask Me Anything, Heywood said that, at that age, she had no concept of what the trip would be like.
“He told me it was going to take three years and we were going to come back. Everything was going to go back to normal. I’d obviously have to leave everything behind - my dog, my friends - but we were going to come back.
“And so it did sound like an adventure. And like a lot of little girls, I worshipped my dad, so I don’t think I ever really questioned it too much. It was just going to happen.”
Quickly though, this voyage turned into a nightmare. Only about six months into the trip, after running into a storm near South Africa, a huge wave nearly sank Wavewalker, leaving it with huge damage and Heywood with extreme head injuries.
The boat managed to make it to the small island of Île Amsterdam, home to a French base, where the doctor operated on Heywood “six or seven times” with no anaesthetic.
“The whole thing, both of the wave, as I always called it, and the operations completely changed my understanding of the risk of this voyage.”
Things hardly got better from there. Rather than a simple three-year voyage as she was promised, the trip ended up lasting 10 years, with her father simply refusing to stop sailing.
Heywood and her brother had to work on the boat to help fund the never-ending trip, meaning that she was unable to maintain her education or have any sense of normality.
While the idea of being whisked away from your normal life for a decade-long sailing trip is not a common occurrence, Heywood advised any parent considering their own grand adventure, or wishing to live out their dream, to consider what impact it could have on their children. She said that it’s all “a question of compromise”.
“There are all sorts of ways to have an adventure and to do it whilst balancing your needs and your children’s needs. So if you take my father’s desire to sail around the world, if he really wanted to do that, there are all sorts of ways to do it.
“First of all, you could wait until they got a little bit older and then do it. If you really needed to do it, then didn’t have to take them with you the whole way.
“He could have done it in parts, so he could have done a bit with us and then we could have gone back.
“It’s not that I think you have to sacrifice and stop everything that you want to do, but I think as a parent, you’ve got to make compromise.”
Wavewalker is Suzanne Heywood's memoir about her trip.
After 10 years of sailing, her parents finally recognised her brother needed school, and they enrolled him in a school in Rotorua. Her parents were meant to stay, but at the last minute, Heywood’s father decided to keep sailing, and she and her brother were left in a bach in Lake Rotoiti.
Heywood said it was an “incredible contrast” of the stunning location but terrible circumstances, with the two alone with little money and no adult contacts, and a risk of deportation as neither of them were New Zealand citizens.
Staying in New Zealand marked the “crescendo” of her experience. “I finally realised in that time in New Zealand that my parents really don’t have my best interests at heart, and that’s a big realisation for a kid.
“I almost don’t say it, but I find a friend who lives in a kind of caravan at the bottom of the road, and she’s had a very tough childhood, she drinks very heavily, and she pretty much forces me to acknowledge this. And I don’t really do anything about it. I mean, it’s actually years before I really come back and kind of confront that. But what I do realise is I’ve got to get myself out of there.”
From that bach in Lake Rotoiti, Heywood writes to a lot of elite universities locally and around the world, and was rejected by many, including the University of Auckland, for not being a citizen.
Oxford University replied, asking her to write two essays, and when she did, they told her they’d interview her if she got herself back to England. After earning money picking kiwifruit, Heywood earned enough for a one-way ticket.
“I look back at that moment, and I think, I don’t know why I wasn’t more petrified than I was, because this was my one bet. It was a one-way ticket. I had no way of coming back. [But I had] nothing to come back to. I mean, I couldn’t go back on the boat again.”
Heywood has gone on to enjoy a successful academic and executive career, holding a number of high-profile jobs and board positions. As a natural writer, she longed to tell the story of Wavewalker, but feared what how her parents would react. She persevered, but that led to a falling out with her family, with her mother dying in 2016 angry with Heywood about the book, while her father has not spoken to her since 2019 because of it.
“At one level that’s incredibly sad, but at another level, I feel this was a decision that they both made, that they couldn’t tolerate me ever telling the truth about what had happened to Wavewalker, and I feel very happy - I feel like a huge weight has lifted off my shoulders now I have told the story.”
